1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of music accessories and more particularly to a device for determining the speed and regularity of play of musical notes and a method for making such determination.
2. Description of the Background
Musicians tend to be a competitive lot, often comparing their instrumental skills with other musicians. This is especially true in the genre of shred guitar, where the ability to play fast is a key skill in addition to properly forming and timing notes. Shred guitar generally refers to lead electric guitar playing that relies heavily on fast passages and the term is usually used with reference to rock and metal guitar playing although it is sometimes used with country, jazz fusion and blues. Shred guitarist use techniques such as tremolo picking, hammer-ons, pull-offs and sweep picking to play upwards of 12-18 notes per second in a given passage or run.
Practitioners and students endlessly debate who among them can play the fastest and young musicians continually try and emulate their idols in terms of speed and technical ability. This phenomenon is not unique to the shred guitar realm as musicians on piano, drums or most any other instrument try to gauge their skill and ability and continually practice and study to improve their craft. Of the skills to be acquired, timing, not just in terms of sheer speed of play but of regularity and accuracy of note play, is among the hardest to master when learning to play music of this or any type.
Most basically, music is the artful arrangement of sounds over time and thus timing, in addition to tonal qualities such as pitch and harmony, is a fundamental element. The term rhythm describes all aspects of music concerned with its structure related to time and the most basic rhythmic unit is the beat, which is a recurring time pattern or pulse that serves as the principal unit of musical time. Beats themselves are regulated by larger recurring units or divisions called measures which are the regular repetitive grouping of a pattern of strong and weak beats that form the meter of the music. Composers and musicians use tempo to define the absolute speed of a piece of music in terms of the number of musical beats played per minute of elapsed real time (Beats Per Minute or BPM).
It is over top of the temporal framework of meter and tempo that the notes of the guitar or other instruments form the melodies and harmonies of musical composition. Whereas beats are often indicated with the sharp strike of a drumstick on a drum head or closed hi-hat, melodic notes are often sustained for one or more measures and are layered over one another with the musician commonly playing several or many successive notes before the sustain of past notes has fully died out. This is particularly so with stringed instruments where a plucked string will continue to vibrate without continued energy input from the musician and where tremolo or other techniques are used to vary the pitch of a note repetitively without subsequent string interaction. In other situations, notes are played in a staccato fashion with numerous short, discrete notes played in succession with little or no sustain. In either case many notes may be played between the beats of the tempo and are layered over one another to built complex melodies and harmonies.
Considerable effort has historically gone into devices to aid musicians in measuring or monitoring the tempo of musical play in terms of beats per minute while substantially less effort has been directed at the timing of notes themselves with no useful devices consequently available to the musician for this purpose. The metronome is among the earliest and most widely used devices for monitoring tempo. Invented in 1812 in Amsterdam, the traditional metronome employs a mechanical clockwork to tick off regular intervals of time indicating the beats of music. Sophisticated metronomes can produce two or more distinct sounds to mark both the beats and indicate the start of each measure of music. Various electronic versions of the metronome have been developed in the modern age improving the accuracy with which they mark time but without appreciably expanding their functionality.
More specifically, while providing a benchmark of musical time, the metronome is incapable of recognizing or reporting the tempo of music played by a musician, to say nothing of recognizing individual melodic notes themselves. The ability to identify the instantaneous tempo of music is valuable to musicians, such as drummers, when practicing and preparing to play but only recently has technology advanced to develop devices to aid drummers in identifying the tempo of beats. The ability to identify the rate of melodic note play would also be valuable to musicians, particularly in shred guitar, although little apparent effort has been expended on this front and no such devices known until this time. One device intended to aid the drummer in learning to play a steady beat is the Combination Metronome And Tempo Monitor embodied in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/778,558 by Phillip Moodie. The device operates as a conventional metronome but is also capable of displaying the tempo in terms of beats per minute of a beat tapped out with a drumstick on the casing of the device itself. The device is apparently intended for use by a drummer in conjunction with a drum kit. The tempo monitoring device of U.S. Pat. No. 5,036,742 to Phillip Youakim is of same vein and works to identify the beats per minute of a tempo beat out on a drum to which it is directly affixed. These devices, by various means, are capable of identifying the regular high attack, high decay wave form of a percussive drumbeat having little or no sustain. They are, however, limited to use with a single drum on which only the beat is continually tapped out, cannot identify the beat within a complex rhythm and are of no use whatsoever with respect to determining the rate and regularity of sustained melodic notes.
The Electric Drum Stroke Counting Machine of U.S. Pat. No. 6,545,207 to Derrell McAffee, et al. is similarly limited to use with a single drum on which high attack/high decay percussive drumbeats are played but operates without regard to musical beat. Rather, the device provides a counting device recording the total number of drum strikes made in a given time period. From this a user could independently determine an average rate of play at the conclusion of that time period. This provides drummers with a quantitative average play rate over a period (for example 60 seconds) which they can compare with the rate and skill of other drummers. However, the average play rate over a given time may be considerably less than the instantaneous maximum play rate achieved by the musician and is an imprecise measure of overall speed. Further, by providing feedback only as an average rate at the conclusion of a drum session, as opposed to an instantaneous rate during play, the disclosure of McAffee does not provide the musician or student with useful information during practice with respect to speed and temporal regularity.
To the musician playing electric guitar or the piano these devices are of no use. Such musicians cannot tap out a tempo with their instruments nor are they marking the beat of the music but rather are playing melody or other accompaniment in the form of sustained notes of irregular time and duration. As such they are not concerned with how accurately and regular the beat is played but rather how fast (or slow) and regularly the individual notes of a riff are played. In order to improve the accuracy and timing of his play and/or to provide a quantitative measure of speed, a musician or musical student on these instruments needs a device capable of providing feedback as to the instantaneous rate of play in terms of the number of notes played per second and the regularity with which those notes are played in real time as the piece is played.
It is, therefore, an object of the present invention to provide a device capable of identifying the speed of execution of irregular sustained melodic notes on a musical instrument
It is further an object of the present invention to provide a device capable of displaying the instantaneously speed of play of such notes to the musician in real time so that the musician can improve his performance during repetitive practice and can quantitatively compare his speed of play with other musicians.
It is further an object of the present invention to provide a device capable of providing instantaneous feedback in real time regarding regularity of note timing to a musician.